Patient engagement is a hot topic for both healthcare professionals and patients. Why, you ask? Because the ultimate goal of healthcare professionals is empowered patients, and improving health outcomes with increased patient engagement is a great way to do just that.
Has your healthcare system experienced a bottleneck transferring patient information amidst the COVID-19 pandemic? If so, you are not alone. Healthcare systems all over the country have been struggling to keep up with the number of COVID-related file transfers flooding their offices. This has resulted in the loss of pertinent patient information that later needs to be re-entered by hospital administrative staff. Additionally, due to the sheer volume of faxes, offices are getting test results sometimes weeks after the fact, which renders them virtually useless.
In Part I of our blog series on Disaster Recovery, we discussed why DR is no longer enough in the healthcare industry. Today we’d like to focus on clearing up a common misconception that disaster recovery and business continuity are essentially the same thing. While disaster recovery is essential, it’s only a small piece of the larger puzzle required to plan for the continuation of healthcare operations.
In the spring of 2016, a monkey caused a nationwide power outage in Kenya, leaving the entire country without power for 15 minutes. While we don’t have many monkeys in the US, the list of potential disasters that can affect your business is nearly endless (power outages, natural disasters, broken water pipes and of course human error). Now that healthcare records are electronic, it’s important that the industry look beyond disaster recovery and build a full business continuity plan to remain fully operational in the event of a disaster.
